This graph says it all. For the first time in a long time, digital advertisers are expressing confidence in the value of digital for brand advertising. This is a message we’ve been talking about for years, because we understand the value of meeting a consumer across platforms, during different day parts, and on different devices. It’s more difficult than ever to maintain top-of-mind awareness, and digital, which most often accompanies the consumer, has the best chance to do this.

The Nielsen study above was conducted earlier in the year but is relevant as we all look past the coming holidays and begin to plan for 2015 in earnest. It shows that almost half of marketers are shifting offline budgets to digital–and especially to digital video.

As you can see, brand advertising on digital is up 33% this year, and has now outpaced direct response. Part of the reason for this is the difficulty of developing direct response campaigns for mobile devices where they might not be welcome, and part is the necessity of getting the attention of customers and prospects who are increasingly online and on the move.

The biggest increase in spending comes from mobile and PC, with print clearly decreasing, and radio, TV and OOH spending staying roughly the same. OOH, however, is mostly billboards, which are not effective for all industries in the same way.

Next year, over 70% of marketers will increase their use of mobile, and 80% will increase their use of social. These categories will blend and converge as the growth of mobile continues and social becomes a mainstream method of selling. We predict that next year will also be a year in which better tools to measure the efficacy of brand advertising campaigns on mobile devices will emerge. We are already working with several partners to produce more sophisticated reporting for our own customers.

If you are still buying some last minute ads for the holiday season, please consider our high impact digital video formats for your existing assets. They blow away the industry benchmarks for engagement and CTRs.